online resize of ext3 possible?

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 17:13, John Stoffel wrote:

> Is it possible to resize an ext3 filesystem while it's online?  

Yes and no.  Yes: you want the bits at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ for it.  But no, it's still
somewhat experimental --- the kernel bits seem robust for me but the
user-land tools still need a bit of work.  For online growth on ext2/3,
you need to prepare space on-disk for the filesystems group descriptor
tables to grow into.  The new format for that is only understood by a
patched mke2fs, so you can't "prepare" an existing filesystem for online
growth just yet.  And e2fsck can't yet properly prepare errors in that
reserved space.

I've *just* done a release of the kernel patches against 2.6.6-rc1 and
the user-space patches against e2fsprogs-1.35, and you're welcome to try
those out.

> It
> looks like resize2fs won't do the trick unless the filesystem is
> unmounted.  

Correct, resize2fs is offline-only.

> And ext2resize takes one look at the filesystem while it's
> mounted and complains as well, this time about un-supported features.

The current one in CVS works for me --- I've added recognition of
extended attributes to that.  A proper release of that is in progress.

Cheers,
 Stephen